2017 News archive

An international team including Associate Professor Tara Murphy has been studying a neutron star collision and found an unusual cocoon of debris, raising doubts about the source of short gamma ray bursts.

For the first time astronomers have measured how a galaxy's spin affects its shape. It sounds simple, but measuring a galaxy's true 3D shape is a tricky problem that astronomers first tried to solve 90 years ago.

Sydney University PhD alumnus, Dr Tim White (currently of the Stellar Astrophysics Centre at Aarhus University) and his team of Danish, Australian and and international astronomers have demonstrated a powerful new technique for observing stars within the Pleiades star cluster, ordinarily far too bright to look at with high performance telescopes.

In a paper recently accepted for publication, Dr Emil Lenc , CAASTRO/SIFA researcher at University of Sydney, and his colleagues, outline the techniques developed to calibrate and correct MWA observations for polarimetry.

A team of SIfA members, led by Prof. Geraint Lewis and Prof. Joss Bland-Hawthorn, has been awarded the HPC Artemis Grand Challenge for massive computation. The project, entitled "Astrophysics Grand Challenge: From Large to Small", aims to shed light on how galaxies come into being.

The School of Physics with Iver Cairns as Director is leading an ARC Industrial Transformation Training Centre (ITTC) for CubeSats, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, and their Applications. The other School of Physics Chief Investigators are A/Prof Joe Khachan and Dr Sergio Leon-Saval. This multidisciplinary training centre project is funded for 5 years with $4,619,950.

For the first time, a team of astronomers led by SIfA PhD student Jane Kaczmarek, has detected a magnetic field associated with the Magellanic Bridge, a gaseous structure in the nearby Magellanic Clouds system.

Forget looking through a telescope at the stars. An astronomer today is more likely to be online: digitally scheduling observations, running them remotely on a telescope in the desert, and downloading the results for analysis.

INSPIRE-2, the CubSat partly developed at the University of Sydney made it to space on April the 19th. The mini satellite carries 5 unique instruments that will demonstrate different space technologies. This is the first time in 15 years that Australia makes it back to space!

A team of astronomers has doubled the number of known young, compact radio galaxies—galaxies powered by newly energized black holes. The improved tally will help astronomers understand the relationship between the size of these radio sources and their age, as well as the nature of the galaxy itself.